Never Lie, Never Sin, Tell Us What A Mess We're In [Open to Multiple]

[all_the_gifts]

Melanie stares at the door to her cell. There is something different about it today. She's having a little trouble placing it, but she knows there's something off. It's concerning. She has been so clear about what ROMAC needs to do to keep everyone else safe from her, and the suspicion that they're messing up somehow makes her very, very nervous.

It's the locks, she realizes after a few moments of intense scrutiny. That is what's wrong. There are supposed to be five, but she only counts four. That can't be right. Melanie approaches the door with a little frown on her face, her fingertips hovering a few inches from the metal, wary of the shock she'll get if she actually touches it. Her hand flits from lock to lock like a hummingbird. Now there are six. How are there six? She counts again, baffled to find that the number has halved itself to three.

She tries to count again, but this time, there are none.

Now she does reach out to touch the door, she can't help it - she can't believe it. They can't have taken the locks away. They're important. Hasn't she made it clear how incredibly important it is that they keep her in here?

The door does not shock her. Instead, it swings open beneath her hand, smooth and silent.

Melanie presses her lips together, her mouth a thin, disapproving line. She doesn't like the thought of leaving her room, but someone has to be told about this so they can get it fixed. Keeping her movements slow and even, as if she's trying to sneak past a group of hungries, Melanie carefully steps out into the hall to look for help.

Comments

[peacefulexplorer]

"Well, okay, for one? You don't need to worry about me." Daniel smiles again, projecting reassurance as best as he can because he can't really bear to hear what Melanie's saying right now. "Might not look it, but I'm not the easiest person to kill."

Not the easiest person to keep dead would be more semantically accurate, but they just braved a raging horde of zombies so Daniel is going to leave that one where it is right now.

"For another, you can't judge yourself for what you might do or what might happen. This is a dream and we're both in it, meaning the Rift put us here. And the Rift, well. Let's just say I'm getting the idea that it has a really twisted sense of humor." His smile gets a little more grim at that. Yeah. Really twisted.

[all_the_gifts]

He still doesn't understand, Melanie thinks, because no sane, decent person could honestly conclude that occasional bouts of fresh air are worth the risk of this dream - this nightmare - becoming a reality. But she doesn't want to argue with him, doesn't want to explain in painful detail how dangerous she can be to good people like him.

She saved his life this time. If the hunger got out of its box, it'd be a different story.

Melanie lifts her shoulders in a little shrug, clearly unconvinced but unwilling to talk about it anymore. They aren't even safe, yet. "We should try to get to my room," she says instead. "If anyplace in here is safe, it'll be there."

[peacefulexplorer]

Melanie doesn't seem eager to talk about it. Which is understandable. Still, that's an awful lot of self-blame for someone so young to be carrying with her. The thought makes his shoulders drop a little.

But Daniel doesn't fight the subject switch. If she doesn't want to talk about it, he won't force her, especially not after she just saved his life. The most he can offer right now is quiet support and sympathy.

"Okay," he agrees with a nod, standing again. "Think I remember how to get there from here. Think we could find something to barricade it shut?"

[all_the_gifts]

Melanie shakes her head. This part of ROMAC headquarters isn't (wasn't?) exactly awash with loose furniture at the best of times, and with hungries potentially around any given corner, she doesn't want to risk the noise associated with prying up something heavy and dragging it into place. "Too loud," she says. "And if there's still power, the locks on my door should go automatically."

Here's hoping her door is open in the first place. And that her room doesn't have any other occupants.

She pads slowly down the hall, though not as slowly as she'd move if there were any hungries actually in sight. This floor seems to be in slightly better shape than the one above; the puddles are fewer and smaller, easy to skirt around, and the mold isn't so bad. But there's no ignoring the derelict feel of the place; it's every bit as abandoned as the rest of the building, even if it was better enforced against unwanted intrusions.

She holds up a hand in warning as they approach an intersection, then creeps ahead to peer around the corner. Her shoulders slump a little: more hungries, half a dozen clustered motionlessly around a sorry little heap of unidentifiable scraps: the remains of their last meal. Melanie leans back around the corner, looks up at Daniel, and solemnly holds up six fingers. Then she frowns, thinking hard. They're too close to the side hall that leads to her room for sneaking by to be an option. She'll have to draw them off, somehow.

[peacefulexplorer]

With the present threat of danger passed, Daniel can take more time to examine the space they're in and then immediately wish he hadn't taken the time to examine the space they're in, because the space they're in is incredibly creepy and abandoned and probably full of those things, and there's still the whole host of questions prickling at the back of his head concerning zombie ethics.

They don't seem sentient, sure, but that doesn't mean they aren't. It's probable they're acting instinctively, reverted to a base "eat to survive" mentality that doesn't seem to extend to actual logical self-preservation. They rely overly on smell and, judging by the clusters of them, might function in a very loose pack structure, minus the hierarchy and intelligent coordination and anything resembling a pack structure in the animalistic sense. Okay, so more like they travel in groups because it's convenient - more prey can be cornered with greater numbers (at this Daniel suppresses another shiver). Maybe that could also be attributed to base instinct, the automatic clustering for strength in numbers.

Their intelligence levels must not be very impressive if Melanie's able to invoke the "if you can't smell it then it must not be there" logic on them, so perhaps Daniel's giving them too much credit.

Melanie's warning hand halts his wandering thought process in its tracks. Then she raises her fingers.

Six of them.

Daniel swallows hard.

"Could we throw something, lead them away?" he whispers. It's an extremely basic strategy but the hungries don't seem to be particularly gifted in the critical thinking department. The issue would be actually throwing something without attracting their attention with the sudden movement.

[all_the_gifts]

Melanie's quick to nod. She'd been thinking of the same thing. A hurled object won't be as enticing as a live animal would be, but trying to hunt something down is out of the question. She can't leave Daniel alone, and she probably wouldn't find anything down here, anyway. This hardly seems like fox territory.

"Do you have anything small that you wouldn't mind parting with?" she quietly asks. "Something that smells human?" No matter how hard she throws something, it's going to come to a halt eventually. If it smells human, that could buy them a few more seconds of distraction.

[peacefulexplorer]

"Um." Daniel starts searching his person, hoping the dream is kind enough to have dropped something of his into the environment along with him, even if it's apparently not friendly enough to include his sidearm. He does, however, find a radio, the sort he'd use to contact the old team for help, and privately shoots the dream a vicious spike of irritation. A useless radio but no sidearm - that seems pretty consistent with the Rift's warped sense of humor regarding Daniel's survival rate in these dreams.

In any case, it might not be good for its intended use but at least it's good for something.

"I have this," he offers, holding up the small communicator. "Will that work?"

[all_the_gifts]

The radio is a slight surprise, and Melanie takes it, turning it between her hands for a close examination. It's not exactly like the walkie-talkie she'd used before, but it's similar enough that she quickly ascertains how it works. And if she's not mistaken, this switch will deliver an obnoxious burst of noisy static.

"This is good," she says with a tentative smile. Then, "Once I throw this, just follow me. My room's halfway down this hall, on the left."

Slipping back into the liquid mosey she's developed, Melanie edges around the corner and toward the group of hungries. She wants to get past them before she throws anything - better not to draw their attention toward Daniel's hiding place at all, even if only for a second.

It's a few tense minutes before she's passed the cluster and found a doorway she can duck into. From there, it's only the work of a moment to flick that switch - the resulting hiss of static is all the louder after the eerie silence - and wing the little radio down the hall. She presses back a little as the hungries stampede past her, then ducks out of the doorway and makes a beeline for her room.

[peacefulexplorer]

He stays hunched around the corner, nerves jangling until the sudden burst of static and the clatter of the flung radio signifies that he needs to move, like now.

Daniel takes off at a dead sprint, Melanie little more than a pale blur in front of him, and practically dives into the room behind her. He can hear them outside, the mindless thudding of feet and he's going to try not to think about that right now, he just seizes the door and slams it shut and prays that it will hold.

That's really all he can do at this point. Because if Melanie's room can't hold them back, there's nowhere else for them to go.

TW: body horror, kindasorta character death??

[all_the_gifts]

At first glance, her room appears to have fared better than the surrounding hallways. The drain in the corner remained unclogged, so there's no standing water on the floor. The posters are faded and curling, but they still cling stubbornly to the walls. The furniture is still in place, though Melanie isn't sure if the chairs would support her weight anymore, and the books on the shelves look as if they might fall apart if she touched them. But it's about as nice as she could have hoped, and it isn't until she turns back to check on Daniel that she sees what's crumpled on the ground just behind the door.

It's a little body, the ribcage grotesquely split to make way for a large, pale stalk that stretches up toward the ceiling, taller than Melanie is herself. A handful of pockmarks show where the spore pods used to hang; the pods themselves are on the floor around the body, impossibly but undeniably split, emptied. The entire image is softened and blurred by the grey carpet of fungus that has grown to fill that corner, but it's not so thick that Melanie can't make out a tuft of blonde hair, or the pink jeans identical to the ones she's wearing, now.

She had already known that this would be how it ended for her. She had accepted it. But she never expected to see it.

Melanie stares, trembles, and says nothing.

[peacefulexplorer]

Daniel's heart is still beating out a rapid staccato but it starts calming down once it becomes clear that they're not about to be abruptly swarmed by hungries. He can catch his breath, glance over at Melanie, and get a horrible nauseating wrench in his chest when he sees what she's looking at.

"Oh my god," he breathes, and for a minute he can't not stare at it in silent horror. Melanie's the same, he realizes vaguely, and her rigid stillness in the face of the sickening, awful sight isn't helping. He automatically reaches out to put one hand on her shoulder, tears his gaze from the thing.

"Melanie?" he whispers. "It's okay. It's gonna be okay."

It's not.

But Daniel doesn't know what else to say. How does one be comforting in a situation like this? Melanie is so obviously shaken by the sight when the entire time she's been carefully assertive, impressively self-assured and calm and rational in what is literally an apocalyptically bad situation that he's pretty sure most adults couldn't handle half as well. If the dream hadn't crossed into nightmare territory already, it certainly has by now. And it's Melanie's.

[all_the_gifts]

Melanie doesn't start at the hand on her shoulder, nor does she immediately tear her eyes away from that grim specter of her own future. But Daniel's whispered reassurances, as absurd as they are, manage to shake her out of her stupor - enough for her to turn away from the body in the corner to hide her face and fist her hands in the sturdy fabric of his jacket.

"I don't like this dream," she says, no less absurd than Daniel's reassurances, but true. "I want to wake up, now."

[peacefulexplorer]

He doesn't have the words to answer so he just wraps his arms around her and hugs, gently, and lets her stay huddled there. He doesn't want her to look at it. He doesn't want either of them to stay in this room a minute longer, but their options are so - limited right now.

"I'm sorry," is all he can come up with. "I know, I'm sorry."

It's wrenching. It's - this is from Melanie's head, torn straight out of her nightmares, and it's just been flung into this sealed room with her, an unforgiving reminder that extends beyond the post-apocalyptic dreamscape they're in now. Daniel almost doesn't want her to wake up, because he doesn't want her to have to deal with the memory of this on her own.

"I'm so sorry," he repeats, uselessly, and wishes he could think of something more tangibly consoling, but all he can do is whisper the same hopeless apology.

[all_the_gifts]

It's fitting, Melanie can't help but think, that after however many decades of watching the world fall to ruin because of what she was, she would have finally returned down here, to the little cell that was supposed to keep everyone else safe. Of course, it makes no sense that the body in the corner should look as she does now, but that doesn't matter. Maybe the dream, or the rift, or her own mind just wanted to make sure she recognized herself.

And here's Daniel, being so kind to her, far more than she deserves. Regardless of her intentions, look at what she's done. How many times can she save his life down here before he falls just like the rest of the world? She should probably pull herself away, and she releases her grip on his jacket to do just that. But then she loses her nerve and wraps her arms around him, instead, leaning into the warm, comforting solidity of him.

This is all just a nightmare. Daniel is real.

Still. "I'm sorry you got stuck here," she eventually mumbles into the general region of his stomach.

[peacefulexplorer]

Before he can think of something better to say, Melanie's hugging him back, entirely unexpected, and Daniel lets her. Physical support is about all he can offer at the moment. If that helps, he'll take it and lend her as much as she needs. When she apologizes he just gives her a little squeeze.

"It's okay." And Daniel's honestly more worried about what this will mean for Melanie than him. That - she shouldn't have had to see that. "And we'll get out of this, I promise."

He pours as much conviction as he can into the words, determined not to let anything else happen to her. She's been through more than enough.

[all_the_gifts]

"I know," Melanie says, her latent pragmatism beginning to reassert itself. "We have to wake up sooner or later." It's what might happen before they wake up that worries her. Even if the hungries leave them alone, she doesn't like the idea of being shut in with her own body.

It's a dream. It's not real. There has to be something they can do to get out of this place - to really get out, not just the room, but this whole terrible situation.

Melanie frowns, thinking hard for a few moments. This has to be her dream. Can she change it? Make the dream do what she wants? That seems reasonable. The only problem is that it's not easy to imagine the world any other way than this.

Maybe she doesn't have to. Not on her own.

"I have an idea," she says, letting go of Daniel so she can pad over to the little bookshelf. The textbooks she disregards, and many of the others are in rough shape - 'Anne of Green Gables' falls apart under her hands - but there's a leather bound copy of 'The Secret Garden' that has weathered the years with relative success. Melanie cradles it in her hands and turns back to Daniel. "Maybe if I imagine someplace nicer," she starts, uncertain and hesitant. Daniel probably knows more about these weird dreams than she does.

[peacefulexplorer]

"That makes sense," he remarks, jaw jutting out thoughtfully. "I've seen it happen but I don't know how and I don't know where we'd end up. It's not like this dream has been all that friendly."

And there's the issue Daniel's less willing to voice, that the dream might just take them and drop them somewhere worse. He might be currently lacking in imagination as to what that could be but that doesn't mean the Rift hasn't.

And then there's the considerably less pleasant option.

"There are ways to, uh, makes ourselves wake up," Daniel admits reluctantly. "But it would mean that we'd have to die."

He doesn't overly mind having to go through that so much - he's had the practice and been to the seminar and has the real world application, so to speak - but the idea of Melanie having to makes his stomach wrench. However mature and resourceful she's been, she's also still a kid who's been through far too much already, waking world or no.

[all_the_gifts]

"No!" is Melanie's immediate, emphatic response. The only death for her here is the one in the corner, and if Daniel gives himself over to the hungries, they only might tear him to pieces. It's just as likely that they'll leave him intact enough to turn into one of them. Either way, "I won't let you," she insists. "You can't." She hasn't worked this hard to keep him alive just to have him die on purpose.

She holds the book aloft with a fierce, stubborn frown on her face. "I want to try this way," she says. Without waiting for a response, she settles herself on the dusty bedspread and starts leafing through the latter half of the book, looking for a nice passage about the garden and shooting the occasional stern glance Daniel's way, as if he might produce a sword out of nowhere and throw himself on it at any moment.

[peacefulexplorer]

"Sorry, no, you're right," Daniel amends hastily. "Let's uh, let's try that first."

Her violent refusal of the idea isn't all that surprising. It's an admittedly horrible idea, however much Daniel is disturbingly okay with putting himself through it. Still, after her firm veto, now wouldn't be a tactful time to introduce the conversational hurdle of oh by the way it wouldn't be the first time I've died horribly, so Daniel keeps quiet.

"Sorry," he says again, a little sheepishly.

[all_the_gifts]

Melanie doesn't look entirely appeased - what an awful thing for him to suggest after everything they've been through already! - but she does shift more of her focus to the book. She has to turn the pages with a bit more care than usual, but she remembers it well, and it doesn't take her too long for her to find one of the nice, descriptive passages about the garden starting to wake up in the springtime.

Focusing proves to be a bit trickier. There are moments where she thinks things are changing, that she's making a difference: a brief whiff of fresh, growing things, a snatch of improbable birdsong. But the nightmare has a good hold on her, and there's nothing she can do about the distressingly solid look of her dilapidated little cell.

She frowns down at the page in frustration, then lifts her head to give Daniel a pensive look. "I think I could do it if my eyes were shut," she says, absently running her palm over the page. She chews her lip a moment, feeling unaccountably shy, then asks, "Could you read it to me?"

[peacefulexplorer]

"I, uh." He stares at her, both taken aback and oddly touched. "Um. Sure, okay."

He takes the book, handling it with a delicacy he ordinarily reserves for the most fragile of artifacts, and peers at the faded lines of text. He's secretly a bit terrified he might tear one of the brittle pages.

After a few moments of shuffling around in search of a pleasant-sounding passage (and a then a few more than necessary as he fully comes to terms with Melanie's suggestion), Daniel coughs a little in a poor attempt to mask nervous anticipation and starts reading:

"At first it seemed that green things would never cease pushing their way through the earth, in the grass, in the beds, even in the crevices of the walls. Then -" He breaks off to squint fiercely at the paled printing, then continues haltingly - "Um, then the green things began to show buds and the buds began to unfurl and show color, every shade of blue, every shade of purple, every tint and hue of crimson."

[all_the_gifts]

"Thank you," Melanie says as he takes the book. She pulls her knees up to her chest and closes her eyes, waiting.

She's used to being read to. It takes two hands to manage a book, and they were never allowed more than one hand free during class. Any reading had to be done aloud, by the teacher. The first book Melanie actually held in her own hands was one that Miss Justineau had illicitly stuffed down the back of her wheelchair, and she'd barely had any time to enjoy it before the base was overrun.

Daniel isn't quite as good as Miss Justineau, but that's all right. The book is old, and the lighting is bad, and what he's doing is good enough. Melanie focuses on his voice, deliberately ignoring everything else, and just listens.

The first changes are subtle. There's a shift in the quality of the air into something more fresh and sharp than the stale atmosphere in the basement. Then, blades of grass begin to poke their way up from the floor, first colonizing the seam where the floor meets the wall, then rippling over the concrete like a thick, green carpet.

Things escalate from there. Cinderblock walls are replaced by stone, which is rapidly overrun with ivy and roses. The grass is joined by patches of flowers, like the ones Miss Justineau brought into the classroom to show everyone what spring really looked like: daffodils and crocuses and several riotous clumps of campion in 'every tint and hue of crimson.'

Melanie doesn't dare open her eyes yet. She can still feel the oppressive weight of ROMAC's tower over her head. "Keep reading," she urges.

[peacefulexplorer]

Daniel can feel something shifting imperceptibly but it all seems oddly peripheral, subtle flickers of an environment reshaping itself. He returns his focus to the book and tries not to stumble over descriptions of irises and white lilies and clusters of roses growing over the sundial. The book is old, the ink discolored, the pages almost crumbling beneath his fingers no matter how gingerly he handles them.

But he can tell Melanie's idea is working as the horrible soft grays gradually sharpen into the eponymous garden's predominant green. He nods at her suggestion and continues:

"Fair fresh leaves, and buds – and buds – tiny at first but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden air."

Daniel takes another breath and gets a lungful of said garden air which, after the stale, trapped feeling of the tiny room, feels like a blessing.

[all_the_gifts]

It's working. She knows it's working, and she feel a sort of… easing, of the pressure above her. Magic, yes, that's what she's doing. Working magic. Her fingers curl as if she's gripping onto a curtain, some last barely-tangible barrier between where she is and where she wants to be.

When Daniel says 'garden air,' she yanks.

The weight of the tower falls away, and bright sunlight lands on Melanie's face. She loosens her hands and cracks open first one eye, then the other, a grin tugging at her lips.

She's sitting on a stone bench, now, and there's a wide blue sky above her, framed by the walls of the secret garden. The flowers are all in full display, and there's birdsong and the faint hum of insects in the air. Melanie stands up on the bench, moving aside a low-hanging branch of wisteria so she can get a better look at the place. It's so beautiful! Whether it's strictly accurate is another matter - some of the plants that Melanie's imagination provided would definitely be more at home in a rainforest than an English garden - but it's a far sight better than the place they left behind.

"We did it!" she exclaims, hopping down off the bench.

[peacefulexplorer]

One minute they're both sitting, Daniel hesitantly reading out the passage and the air shivering with the strain of the words, and the next they're - not.

Daniel looks up, mouth open, the book almost entirely forgotten. The sunlight gleaming down at them is a welcome contrast to the dark and derelict building, a complete tonal about-face. Melanie's recreated the titular garden, blending the description on the pages with details Daniel assumes came from her own head. The effect is striking, if not strictly botanically accurate.

He closes the book and carefully tucks it under his own arm - it must have traveled with them through kinetic necessity since Daniel had been holding it at the time - and stands to better observe their startlingly beautiful new dream setting. He quickly decides that he vastly prefers it to the building they were in before. Both versions. For a few minutes he can only stand and stare in silent, appreciative wonder. Melanie's enthusiastic reaction returns him to the present.

"You did it," he answers, smiling. "You did this with your mind. Which is really...wow. It's, it's incredible, really."

He's not lying. The attention to detail, while not what Daniel would call conventional, is stunning - and unconventional has never equated to anything bad in his mind. It demonstrates an ability to think beyond common confines, a freedom of imagination Melanie clearly possesses. She's a bright kid, which, as Daniel soon remembers, makes her real world situation all the more sobering. He can't understand why someone with this much intellect and creative energy would be locked up, would want to be locked up. Her potential is astronomical. And she very obviously loves books, only serving to endear to him more.